Book review: The Last Child by John Hart
John Hart's new novel was a huge disappointment to me. I loved his last, Down River, because of the beautifully rendered setting and the rich characterization. This one sacrifices setting and character to plot.
It's a dandy plot, admittedly, about a 13 year-old boy desperate to find his missing twin sister, and the police detective obsessed with the case and perhaps with the missing girl's mother, as well. It's a fast-paced affair, with the requisite one-sentence paragraphs to keep things moving, although to be accurate, they are usually not sentences.
Just fragments.
Unfortunately, the book calls upon too many tv-movie cliches: the angst-ridden detective, his politically-minded boss who throws bureaucratic obstacles in his way, the rich, well-connected and evil businessman, the beautiful, weak woman who needs the hero to rescue her.
The pivotal character is the boy, Johnny, who takes it upon himself to find his sister. He has studied up on vision quests and native American lore, and armed himself with eagle feathers, for reasons that remain obscure to me. This character is a major missed opportunity. I would love to have had a better look inside him, but the imperative of the
suspense-novel structure precluded that.
Oh, and I pinpointed the doers pretty early.
